Reasoning with Truth

The aim of the paper is to formulate rules of inference for the predicate 'is true' applied to sentences. A distinction is recognised between (ordinary) truth and definite truth and consequently between two notions of validity, depending on whether truth or definite truth is the property preserved in valid arguments. Appropriate sets of rules of inference governing the two predicates are devised. In each case the consequence relation is in harmony with the respective predicate. Particularly appealing is a set of ND rules for ordinary truth in which premises and assumptions play different roles, premises being taken to assert definite truth, assumptions to suppose truth. This set of rules can be said to capture everyday reasoning with truth. Also presented are formal characterisations, in the meta-language and in the object language, of paradoxical and 'truth teller'-like sentences.     

The Perspective of Islamic Fundamentalists and the Limits of Rational Choice Theory

How can we best understand Islamic fundamentalism? As fundamentalism has become an increasingly significant political force, many different interpretations have been offered, with fundamentalism explained as both a rational reaction against modernity and as a pathological retreat from reality. We argue here that part of the scholarly failure to understand and deal with the growth of religious fundamentalism results from a failure to recognize the importance of cognitive differences in worldviews held by fundamentalists. By providing an empirical analysis of how fundamentalists see the world—what we identify as a fundamentalist perspective—we hope to supply an important missing piece in the literature on fundamentalism. To do so, we utilized a narrative and survey interview technique to contrast the worldviews of fundamentalists with those of comparable Muslims who are not fundamentalists. Our analysis suggests Islamic fundamentalism attracts because it provides a basic identity, an identity which in turn provides the foundation for daily living. The fundamentalist perspective itself is best understood through reference to a worldview which makes no distinction between public and private, in which truth is revealed by revelation, and reason is subservient to religious doctrine. Religious dictates dominate on all basic issues, and only within the confines of the fundamentalist identity are choices decided by a cost/benefit calculus.     

Mendus on Philosophy and Pervasiveness

This is a rejoinder to Susan Mendus'How Androcentric is Western Philosophy? a Reply', The Philosophical Quarterly , 46 (1996), pp. 60–6, which addresses my 'How Androcentric is Western Philosophy?', ib ., pp. 48–59. The viability of the distinction between pervasive and non-pervasive androcentrism is defended, but I claim that most claims in the original paper do not presuppose it. Moreover, the original paper does not presuppose that there is a clear demarcation line between pervasive and non-pervasive androcentrism. I argue further that one can make use of some parts of philosophical systems while rejecting others, that Gilligan does see ethics as pervasively androcentric, and that Rawls' theory is not a good example of pervasive androcentrism.     

Ecumenism between the world religions

Conclusion We seem then to be left with the fourth position outlined above as the best solution we have to the problem of religious diversity. No doubt this will be far too radical for some religious believers in that, while it allows a believer to hold that his or her religion has some kind of paradigmatic status it also admits that genuine religious developments may take place in other religions. On the other hand it will not be radical enough for other people who will see it as denying the integrity and autonomy of other religious ways and sanctioning some degree of religious exclusivity and intolerance in that, by seeing Christianity as having some essential core of truth that Buddhism lacks, I am claiming superiority for Christianity. And vice versa, if I claim that Buddhism is the privileged way of enlightenment, I am claiming superiority for Buddhismvisà-vis Christianity. Nevertheless, even if this position does notsolve the problem of religious diversity it does at least show which of the alternative solutions are finally untenable, both on religious and philosophical grounds. And it does provide a basis for genuine ecumenical dialogue between the world religions. Indeed, by recognising that a religious believer can hold that genuine developments of religious values may take place in other religions, it makes such dialogue absolutely necessary in much the same way as the Christian Churches have been led to see ecumenical dialogue as not merely an option but a necessity.     

DEMONS AND THE ISOLATION ARGUMENT

Justifying a belief gives reason to think that the belief is true. So our concept of justification contains a 'truth connection'. I canvass a number of proposals for analysing this. In the end, two competing conceptions of the truth connection remain: the first, that justifying a belief makes the belief objectively probable, the second, that justifying a belief makes the belief probable in a world which would make true our other beliefs. I discuss reasons for embracing and rejecting these two versions of the truth connection. Ultimately, the two versions appear to represent distinct but equally plausible conceptions of justification. I conclude by rejecting the proposal that these truth connections respectively capture internalist and externalist conceptions of justification.     

Belief Norms and Blindspots

I defend the thesis that beliefs are constitutively normative from two kinds of objections. After clarifying what a “blindspot” proposition is and the different types of blindspots there can be, I show that the existence of such propositions does not undermine the thesis that beliefs are essentially governed by a negative truth norm. I argue that the “normative variance” exhibited by this norm is not a defect. I also argue that if we accept a distinction between subjective and objective norms, there need be no worrying tension between doxastic norms of truth and doxastic norms of evidence. I show how a similar approach applies to the attitude of guessing. I then suggest that if we distinguish between practical and theoretical rationality, we will prefer a negative form of norm that does not positively oblige us to form beliefs. I finish by considering an alternative possible subjunctive form of norm that would also avoid problems with blindspots, but I suggest this has a nonintuitive consequence.     

Neosentimentalism and the valence of attitudes

Neosentimentalist accounts of value need an explanation of which of the sentiments they discuss are pro-attitudes, which attitudes are con-attitudes, and why. I argue that this project has long been neglected in the philosophical literature, even by those who make extensive use of the distinction between pro- and con-attitudes. Using the attitudes of awe and respect as exemplars, I argue that it is not at all clear what if anything makes these attitudes pro-attitudes. I conclude that neither our intuitive sense of the distinction nor the vague accounts of it that exist in the philosophical literature are especially helpful in sorting out the hard cases. What is needed is a more explicit and thorough account of what the valence of our attitudes consists in.     

The Proof of Utility and Equity in Mill's Utilitarianism

Bolzano incorporated Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts into the doctrine of propositions by distinguishing between conceptual (Begriffssätze an sich) and intuitive propositions (Anschauungssätze an sich). An intuitive proposition contains at least one objective intuition, that is, a simple idea that represents exactly one object; a conceptual proposition contains no objective intuition. After Bolzano, philosophers dispensed with the distinction between conceptual and intuitive propositions. So why did Bolzano attach philosophical importance to it? I will argue that, ultimately, the value of the distinction lies in the fact that conceptual and intuitive truths have different objective grounds: if a conceptual truth is grounded at all, its ground is a conceptual truth. The difference in grounds between conceptual and intuitive truths motivates Bolzano's criticism of Kant's view that intuition plays the fundamental role in mathematics, a conceptual science by Bolzano's lights.     

Play, agreement and consensus

In this paper I employ the analysis of play to clarify the distinction between an agreement and a consensus, and I argue that it is the conditions supplied by the playful process that enable us to partake in the recognition and creation of truth. Gadamer's hermeneutical truth, unlike propositional truth, speaks of the interpretive act whereby meaning is recognized. This interpretive recognition of meaning is described by Gadamer as an occurrence of interpretive play orgenuine understanding. Regarding Gadamer's conception of truth as modelled on agreement rather than consensus, I demonstrate that it is in the process of play that we achieve the making and maintaining of the conditions that are necessary for agreement, and that the nature of understanding is most clearly revealed by viewing it as a playful process.     

Moral Sentimentalism in Counterfactual Contexts: Moral Properties Are Response-Enabled

According to moral sentimentalism, there are close connections between moral truths and moral emotions. Emotions largely form our moral attitudes. They contribute to our answerability to moral obligations. We take them as authoritative in guiding moral judgement. This role is difficult to understand if one accepts a full-blown moral realism, according to which moral truths are completely independent of our emotional response to them. Hence it is tempting to claim that moral truths depend on our emotional responses. I outline a problem for this view: we are adamant that, if our moral sentiments were different, things would be the same, morally speaking. Moral truth does not seem to counterfactually depend on moral sentiments. I show how this independence can be reconciled with the role of moral sentiments in guiding our moral outlook. I draw on Yablo’s distinction between response-dependent and response-enabled properties. I propose that moral truths are response-enabled: their supervenience base does not include anything about our emotions. Hence they do not counterfactually depend on changes in our emotional response. However, their factual supervenience base being naturally ineligible, it is ultimately our response that enables them to play their role as an independent moral compass.     

Play,agreement and consensus

In this paper I employ the analysis of play to clarify the distinction between an agreement and a consensus, and I argue that it is the conditions supplied by the playful process that enable us to partake in the recognition and creation of truth. Gadamer's hermeneutical truth, unlike propositional truth, speaks of the interpretive act whereby meaning is recognized. This interpretive recognition of meaning is described by Gadamer as an occurrence of interpretive play orgenuine understanding. Regarding Gadamer's conception of truth as modelled on agreement rather than consensus, I demonstrate that it is in the process of play that we achieve the making and maintaining of the conditions that are necessary for agreement, and that the nature of understanding is most clearly revealed by viewing it as a playful process.     

TRUTH, RELATIVISM, AND CROSSWORD PUZZLES

Abstract. Neither the correspondence nor the coherence theory of truth does justice to the truth claims made in science and theology. I propose a new definition that relates truth to solving puzzles. I claim that this definition is more adequate than either of the traditional theories and that it offers two additional benefits: first, it provides grounds for a theory regarding the relations between theology and science that may stand up better to philosophical scrutiny than does critical realism; and second, it blocks the move to relativism based on recognition of the plurality of perspectives and the historical and social conditioning of knowledge.     

California Unnatural: On Fine's Natural Ontological Attitude

Abela accepts Fine's account of realism and instrumentalism, but thinks that we can reject the Natural Ontological Attitude by distinguishing the theoretical attempt to make sense of scientific practice from choosing the attitude we bring to the debate, or to science itself. But Abela's attitudes are vulnerable to Fine's criticisms of the philosophical positions. However, if we take attitude as contrastive and as full-blooded enough to lead to different behaviour we can see a gap in Fine's position. He cannot tell us why it is science that he trusts. When we look more widely, the philosophical positions might be seen as ways of justifying that trust.     

Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of changing stakes

One of the many ways that ‘deflationary’ and ‘inflationary’ theories of truth are said to differ is in their attitude towards truth qua property. This difference used to be very easy to delineate, with deflationists denying, and inflationists asserting, that truth is a property, but more recently the debate has become a lot more complicated, owing primarily to the fact that many contemporary deflationists often do allow for truth to be considered a property. Anxious to avoid inflation, however, these deflationists are at pains to point out that the truth property, on their view, is not a property of any significant interest. Correspondingly, inflationists have seen this as an opportunity to refine what kind of property they think truth is, which—according to them—moves their views beyond deflationism. The upshot of this is that there are number of different accounts in the literature of what distinguishes an inflationary truth property from a deflationary one, or—as it is sometimes put—what distinguishes a ‘substantive’ property from an ‘insubstantive’ one. This has made it hard to pin down exactly what is at issue at the metaphysical level between deflationists and inflationists, which makes it increasingly hard to see how debates between them are properly phrased. Given that these positions represent the two central attitudes towards truth in contemporary debates, this makes for a serious obstacle for the project of discerning the correct theory of truth. The aim of this paper is to discern the best way to distinguish between substantive and insubstantive properties, and thus to restore some focus to these debates. I argue that the three central distinctions in the literature fail, and offer what I take to be a more promising distinction in terms of a graded distinction between abundant and sparse properties.     

Epistemic Gradualism and Ordinary Epistemic Practice: Responce to Hetherington

This paper responds to Stephen Hetherington's discussion of my ‘Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?’ (2004). The Infallibilist skeptic holds that in order to know something, one must be able to rule out every possible alternative to the truth of one’s belief. This requirement is false. In this paper I first clarify this requirement’s relation to our ordinary practice. I then turn to a more fundamental issue. The Infallibilist holds – along with many non-skeptical epistemologists – that Infallibility is epistemically superior to the epistemic position attained when we have (what we ordinarily call) knowledge. This is false, too, as our ordinary practices show. Ordinary epistemic appraisal does not concern our standing on a scale of evaluation which has Infallibility at its apex. For this reason, even if gradualism is correct, it does not show how Infallibilist skepticism can arise out of our ordinary practice.     

Etchemendy on Squeezing Arguments and Logical Consequence: a Reply to Griffiths

Owen Griffiths has recently argued that Etchemendy’s account of logical consequence faces a dilemma. Etchemendy claims that we can be sure that his account does not overgenerate, but that we should expect it to undergenerate. Griffiths argues that if we define the relationship between formal and natural language as being dependent on logical consequence, then Etchemendy’s claims are not true; and if we define the relationship as being independent of logical consequence, then we cannot assess the truth of the claims without further information. I argue that Griffiths misconstrues Etchemendy’s theory and overstates the first horn of the dilemma: Etchemendy does see the relationship as being dependent on logical consequence, but that does not mean that his claims are not true.     

Was Wittgenstein Frege's Heir

Dummett has claimed that Wittgenstein's views, as expressed in The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations , build on the attack on psychologism initiated by Frege. Frege's rejection of psychologism led him to the view that the meanings of sentences are thoughts which objectively exist in a third realm. It was Wittgenstein, according to Dummett, who, inheriting Frege's insights, provided a genuinely anti-psychologistic account of understanding by insisting that we explain understanding a sentence in terms of the use that is made of it. I challenge this interpretation of the relationship between Wittgenstein and Frege. I argue that the analysis does not sufficiently distinguish anti-psychologism and anti-mentalism. In the light of this distinction we can see that Wittgenstein misrepresents Frege's views, and confuses concepts with ideas. By being more faithful to Frege's actual views concerning the objectivity of concepts we can give a robustly realist account of mathematical truth which does not involve any objectionable psychologism or mentalism.
email : Karen.Green@arts.monash.edu.au     

Pragmatic Concerns and Images of the World

I defend a pragmatist reinterpretation of Sellars’s famous manifest-scientific distinction. I claim that in order to do justice to this important distinction we must first recognize, despite what philosophers—including, arguably, Sellars—often make of it, that the distinction does not draw an epistemological or metaphysical boundary between different kinds of objects and events, but a pragmatic boundary between different ways in which we interact with objects and events. Put differently, I argue that the manifest-scientific distinction, in my view, can be best understood, not as a metaphysical distinction between apparent and real objects and events, or an epistemological distinction between perceptible and imperceptible objects and events, but rather as a distinction, which is not necessarily rigid over time, between distinct ways in which we collectively deal, in practice, with objects and events.     

The value of practical usefulness

Some moral theories, such as objective forms of consequentialism, seem to fail to be practically useful: they are of little to no help in trying to decide what to do. Even if we do not think this constitutes a fatal flaw in such theories, we may nonetheless agree that being practically useful does make a moral theory a better theory, or so some have suggested. In this paper, I assess whether the uncontroversial respect in which a moral theory can be claimed to be better if it is practically useful can provide a ground worth taking into account for believing one theory rather than another. I argue that this is not the case. The upshot is that if there is a sound objection to theories such as objective consequentialism that is based on considerations of practical usefulness, the objection requires that it is established that the truth about what we morally ought to do cannot be epistemically inaccessible to us. The value of practical usefulness has no bearing on the issue.